Spot Me was inspired by our day to day interactions and common occurrences where we spot a friend a couple bucks and then get stuck in the awkward situation of not knowing how or when to repay the favor. Enter Spot Me which allows users to track those favors owed, helping people express more gratitude and focus less on the exact dollar value.

What it does:

After any hangout, users are prompted to send a short thank you note which is then recorded in their feed

Users can also follow up and schedule their next hangout to return the favor

Spot Me auto-syncs with their Google/Apple calendar and allows friends to easily schedule those dates.

How we built it:

To create Spot Me, we used IDE Xcode and language Swift to implement the app’s user interface and functional requirements.
For integrating Google Calendar when scheduling hangouts from one app user to another, we utilized the Google Calendar API so that scheduling hangouts are more convenient.

Challenges we ran into:

Since this is our whole team’s first Hackathon and iOS application development experience, we ran into some challenges that affected our project’s resolution. It was our first exposure to Swift and databases, so much of our time was spent getting acclimated to Swift and iOS development.

Accomplishments that were proud of:

We were happy that we were able to design an application from scratch that improves society’s communication and can help day-to-day transactions. We were very proud to be able to improve our knowledge about iOS application development and learning about APIs/account authentication. Ultimately working collaboratively with completely new people with different skill sets was very rewarding.

What we learned:

We learned that application development takes time and it is important that we brainstorm and organize our ideas efficiently. We found that there is so much that goes into the main design of the app and the finished, working product.
There is so much that goes into mobile and iOS development that we personally never imagined. It was a very big learning curve for us but we were able to teach ourselves during the hack on how to use the new language and implement it to create a functioning demo of our application!

What’s next for Spot Me:

Currently, our app redirects users to Google Calendar when using the Spot Me’s Scheduling Hangout feature. To improve that functionality, we want to further develop how we utilize the Google Calendar API so that users can access the data needed from their Google Calendar directly in our app.

Since we didn’t have enough time to implement the app’s database, we want to incorporate a system database, like Google Firebase, to authenticate user accounts, manage user data, store messages.

We want to implement more dynamic functionalities to our application before fully publishing. We’d want to develop hopefully a template to be able to add thank you notes to your timeline as well as better user interface interactions such as improved transitions and changing graphics on each view controller.

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I worked on the front end. This project helped me learn more about iOS development, which is very helpful and informative because I want to specialize in User Interface Design. Also, I learned the basics of how APIs work.

I worked on backend and using swift changed the user interface interactive pages of our application; it was my first time practicing iOS mobile development and learning about databases, which was a steep learning curve, but I grew so much from the experience!

I created the logo and the mock ups for layout of Spot Me; I then worked on the backend using Swift to develop the app. Through this process I learnt a lot about UI/UX and iOS application development as well as APIs!